Design and engineering
The company currently focuses its nuclear business on the first part of the fuel cycle, which it markets both domestically and internationally.
At ENUSA, we benefit from the latest technological advances through transfer agreements with our partners and licensors, Westinghouse and General Electric (GE). This has enabled us to cover the design, manufacture and supply of fuel to domestic and foreign nuclear power plants, as well as all engineering services related to the management and optimisation of fuel used in the reactor. Each individual action plan we develop is agreed upon internally between the different organisations of the company involved and each client.
The fuel engineering that we develop at ENUSA covers all technical aspects of the life of nuclear fuel: from the conceptual development and introduction of new products for irradiation in commercial PWR and BWR reactors to its storage and transport in dry casks as irradiated fuel.
These stages in the life of nuclear fuel can be summed up as follows: the development and introduction of new products and design methodologies, the engineering of refuelling and its safety analysis, the definition of the product to be manufactured and manufacturing support, the monitoring of fuel behaviour in the core, the analysis of operating experience and the subsequent feedback of the design and its tools, and finally the characterisation and analysis for the classification of irradiated fuel for dry storage and transport.
For this, it is necessary to cover nuclear design aspects as well as radiological, mechanical, thermo-mechanical, thermo-hydraulic and material calculations; to achieve this we count on our fuel engineering department, which has nearly thirty years of experience in fuel design and licensing in several European countries.
These activities are possible thanks to the high qualification of ENUSA's personnel, the use of calculation tools developed in-house and/or by our licensors, Westinghouse and GE. We also use advanced tools to perform highly complex mechanical and thermal (Finite Element Method), thermohydraulic (Computational Fluid Mechanics) and Radiological (criticality, shielding and source term) calculations.
Our knowledge and experience of fuel, its design and behaviour, as well as the integrated view of the whole life of nuclear fuel allow us to provide our customers with a set of high value-added services, often unique in nature and usually requiring a high development effort. They also allow us, either autonomously or in collaboration with technology partners, to develop new nuclear fuel fabrication and inspection equipment. Finally, as one of our fundamental pillars, engineering at ENUSA is based on a powerful R&D&I, cooperating with Spanish universities through collaboration or participation projects in training activities, and on the promotion of and/or participation in national and international projects on key technical aspects of nuclear fuel.
Our fuel engineering department has nearly thirty years of experience in fuel design and licensing in several European countries.
